I think this is a good com­ment about how the brain works, but do re­mem­ber that the hu­man brain can both hunt in packs and do physics. Most sys­tems you might build to hunt are not able to do physics, and vice versa. We’re not perfectly com­pe­tent, but we’re still gen­eral.

+1 on be­ing con­fused, I’ve heard good things about CC. Just now check­ing the wikipe­dia page, their ac­tual pri­ori­ties list is sur­pris­ingly close to GiveWell pri­ori­ties lists (macronu­tri­ents, malaria, de­worm­ing, and then fur­ther down cash trans­fers) - and I see Thomas Schel­ling was on the panel! In par­tic­u­lar he seems to have crit­i­cised the use of dis­count rates on eval­u­at­ing the im­pact of cli­mate change (which sounds close to an x-risk per­spec­tive).

I would be in­ter­ested in a write-up from any­one who looked into it and made a con­scious choice to not as­so­ci­ate with /​ to not try to co­or­di­nate with them, about why they made that choice.

+1 Distill is ex­cel­lent and high-qual­ity, and plau­si­bly has im­por­tant re­la­tion­ships to al­ign­ment. (FYI some of the founders lately joined OpenAI, if you’re figur­ing out which org to put it un­der, though Distill is prob­a­bly its own thing).

Imag­ine there are two donor lot­ter­ies, each one hav­ing had 40k donated to them, one with lots of peo­ple in the lot­tery you think are very thought­ful about what pro­jects to donate to, and one with lots of peo­ple in the lot­tery you think are not thought­ful about what pro­jects to donate to. You’re con­sid­er­ing which to add your 10k to. In ei­ther one the re­turns are good in ex­pec­ta­tion purely based on you get­ting a 20% chance to 5x your dona­tion (which is good if you think there’s in­creas­ing marginal re­turns to money at this level), but also in the other 80% of wor­lds you have a prefer­ence for your money be­ing al­lo­cated by peo­ple who are more thought­ful.

This isn’t the main con­sid­er­a­tion—un­less you think the other peo­ple will do some­thing ac­tively very harm­ful with the money. You’d have to think that the other peo­ple will (in ex­pec­ta­tion) do some­thing worse with a marginal 10k than you giv­ing away 10k does good.

You’re right that I had sub­tly be­come ner­vous about join­ing the donor lot­tery be­cause “then I’d have to do all the work that Adam did”. Thanks for re­mind­ing me I don’t have to if it doesn’t seem worth the op­por­tu­nity cost, and that I can just donate to what­ever seems like the best op­por­tu­nity given my own mod­els :)

I also think this sort of ques­tion might be use­ful to ask on a more in­di­vi­d­ual ba­sis—I ex­pect each fund man­ager to have a differ­ent an­swer to this ques­tion that in­forms what pro­jects they put for­ward to the group for fund­ing, and which pro­jects they’d en­courage you to in­form them about.

Also it may be the case if some­one who the grant-mak­ers would be ex­cited about had ap­plied, they would had given them sup­port, but there weren’t such ap­pli­cants. (Note that Bay Area biosec got the the grant)

When I spoke to ~3 peo­ple about it in the Bay, none of them knew the grant ex­isted or that there was an op­tion for them to work on com­mu­nity build­ing in the bay full time.

CEA doesn’t run any reg­u­lar events, com­mu­nity spaces, or fund peo­ple to do ac­tive com­mu­nity build­ing in the Bay that I know of, which seemed odd given the den­sity of EAs in the area and thus the marginal benefit of in­creased co­or­di­na­tion there.

I think that refer­ences are a big deal and putting them off as a ‘safety check’ af­ter the offer is made seems weird. That said, I agree with them be­ing a blocker for ap­pli­cants at the early stage—want­ing to ask a se­nior per­son to be a refer­ence if they’re se­ri­ously be­ing con­sid­ered, but not ask if they’re not, and not want­ing to bet wrong.

I think it is easy to grow too early, and I think that many of the naive ways of putting effort into growth would be net nega­tive com­pared to the coun­ter­fac­tual (some­what analagous to a com­pany that quickly makes 1 mil­lion when it might’ve made 1 billion).

Fo­cus­ing on ac­tu­ally mak­ing more progress with the ex­ist­ing peo­ple, by build­ing more tools for them to co­or­di­nate and col­lab­o­rate, seems to me the cur­rent marginal best use of re­sources for the com­mu­nity.

(I agree that effort should be spent im­prov­ing the com­mu­nity, I just think ‘size’ isn’t the right di­men­sion to im­prove.)